Hi @Flibbles,
As an intermediate user, I do enjoy crossing thresholds of “getting it” about how TW “wants” me to approach things. I’ve absorbed the habit of using a <$list>
widget — often with limit[1]
in its filter — to accomplish display of conditional elements, and later I may refactor once I see the power of a template or cascade approach. It’s kinda cool, in an occam’s razor way. Like learning how to build out a whole circuit board with NAND gates.
Still, nearly every newbie here at the forum has a bit of a struggle with why <$list>
counts as the right tool for the task they come here to ask about — given that what they want seems (to them) nothing like a “list”!
Meanwhile, the cascade mechanism is a tremendously powerful way of handling conditional matters, but it’s unwieldy for most ordinary tasks.
(Erring on the side of keeping certain complexities “in-tiddler” is understandably tempting for ordinary users who want most tiddler names to be nodes of meaning directly relevant to their project, and who want their “Recents” tab to track that recognizable project content, not little utility tiddlers that do work behind the scenes.)
I think the new <% if %>
affordances (even if <% elseif %>
feels a bit roundabout) hits a sweetspot of intelligibility (as well as preserving backward compatibility).
After all, displaying something conditionally is the kind of task that pretty much any beginner will need to do, and even for me, I suspect this new shortcut tool will make my future self less confused (and/or will free up time otherwise lost to writing out comments to my future self about what’s going on with each nested level of <$list>
here).
Since the <% if %>
toolset offers a cognitive shortcut, it’s optional whether to use it, right?
There’s often a tradeoff between encouraging “optimal” habits and letting people rely on gaurdrails, training wheels, etc. I think it’s reasonable for most US-market keyboard manufacturers to put qwerty labels on the keys, even though you really shouldn’t look at your hands while you type — and even though nobody should be using Qwerty anyway. ) At the risk of supporting bad habits for those who never get it about touch-typing (let alone what makes a keyboard layout a choiceworthy one), it’s still mighty helpful to those who haven’t yet streamlined their skills, and who might have more urgent projects at hand.